Retrofitting of an Office Building into Hostel Usage: an Example of PBD in Portugal

Portuguese Fire Safety code is prescriptive but the performance-based approach is allowed in some cases: retrofitting buildings (if it is impossible to be code compliant), singular buildings, structural fire resistance and evacuation design. However the code don’t have any performance criteria or other any kind of specific conditions for the PBD approach. AHJ approval is mandatory but AHJ officials don’t have specific FSE knowledge and feel uncomfortable when dealing with a PBD approach.

The Portuguese code requirements for offices and for hospitality buildings are quite different. For instance, a 200 guest hotel has the same fire risk classification than an office building with 1.000 employees. The maximum travel distance for hotels is 50% shorter than for offices. Those huge differences make the retrofitting of an office building into a hostel usage very challenging. To make it even more difficult, the investor and the architect’s wanted to suppress one of the existing stairs and add an extra floor in the top of the building. We made a ASET/RSET analysis to assess if the existing stairs could provide adequate conditions to a safe evacuation, using performance criteria from BS 7974:2001, ISO/TR 16738:2009 and INSTA TS 950:2014.